940,373 
R167w 


The 


Watch on the 


By Brigade Sergeant-Major 


ALLEN C. RANKIN 


From Field Artillery Headquarters 
Second Division 
American Army of Occupation 
in Germany 


Government Loan Organization 
Second Federal Reserve District 
Liberty Loan Committee 


V-348 


Brtres SERGEANT-MAJOR 
ALLEN C. RANKIN, returned 

from the Army of Occupation by 
order of the Secretary of War to Gen- 
eral Pershing, is now on furlough, 
technically granted at Camp Meigs, 
Washington. 

Brigade Sergeant-Major Rankin en- 
listed with the 12th Field Artillery of 
the Regular Army at St. Asaph, Fort 
Myer, Virginia, which was constituted 
with the 5th and 6th Marines, the 9th 
and 23d Infantry, and the 15th and 
17th Field Artillery into the Second 
Division of the American Expedition- 
ary Forces. The Second, which suf- 
fered a 125 per cent replacement from 
its entrance into action in March, 1918, 
to the signing of the Armistice in No- 
vember, 1918, and which captured one- 
fourth of all prisoners taken by the A. 
E. F., went through the first and great 
action of Chateau Thierry, through 
Soissons, the Argonne and Argonne- 
Meuse engagements, Mont Blanc and 
the last Verdun battles. The only 
important battle of the war in which 


‘ it missed service was Cantigny. Ran- 


kin was twice gassed and was wounded 
at Soissons, but returned to the bri- 
gade in eight days, going with them 
into Germany. The First and Second 
Divisions are the only ones in the 
Army of Occupation which have 
crossed the Rhine. 


UNIVERSITY OF 
ILLINOIS LIBRARY 
AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 
BOOKSTACKS 


FYO. ae 
Bolus 
The Watch on the Rhine 


By Brigade Sergeant-Major ALLEN C. RANKIN 


LAD to be back? Oh, boy, am 
I? There’s no place in all 
the world like these little old 
United States, and heaven 
won't look any better than 
Hoboken does from the deck 
of a homeward-bound trans- 
port. Never again do I want 

to see the face of the Liberty Lady in the 

Harbor unless I go out to wash it. War will 

be nothing but a memory to me all the rest of 

my life unless— 


> Ror Ns iy 4 
ZI “@ 


“Gk 
hs 


—Unless the Victory Liberty Loan Falls Down! 


For, if it falls, there’ll come a time when I'll 
be lifting my right hand again and saying “I 
do” voluntarily and all the rest of it, and swing- 
ing kitpack and saddlebags, and blinking at 
the Jersey shore line, and facing forward once 
more on the western front. If it fails, Germany 
is going to war again before I’m too old to get 
back in the line. She’s cowed, and crushed, 
and conquered now, but there’s fire down under 
her ashes, and some day it’s going to blaze un- 
less we keep the fire hose right in front of her 
eyes; and that fire hose is nothing else but her 
fear of the American people. 

The people of Germany are figuring today 
that they can beat Belgium and France and 
Italy and England, all together. They know, 
though, that they can never bully the world if 
the American people stand against them, but 


they are planning and scheming and hoping 
to shift the American people. In that hope 
they are watching the Victory Liberty Loan. 
By its failure or its success the German people 
will judge if we, the American people, want to 
hold the victory we have won. If the Victory 
Loan doesn’t go across with a whiz and a 
bang that will prove that our country backs 
the righteousness of the war now just as it 
backed us while we fought at the front, Ger- 
many is going to take heart. Germany is 
going to say, “Oh, yes, the Americans came 
into the war, and while they were in it, they 
fought to win; but now they are sorry that 
they went in, and they will not fight us 
again. The time is with us when we must pay 
through the nose, but the time will come when 
we will have ended the payment. And then 
—,” ‘Then will come another war, and its time 
will not be so far off that the crowd of us can’t 
get in again. For it will be the same kind of 
war all over again, and we can’t, before God, 
keep out of that kind and hold our nation’s 
honor. 
How do I know? 

_ Since December I’ve been in the Rhine Val- 
ley, in the districts that the pacifists, ante-war 
and post-war, love to call “the Germany of 
the Christmas tree, the Germany of Heine and 
Goethe, the Germany of Bach and Beethoven, 
the Germany of legend and folk song, the Ger- 
many of peace and beauty.” I’ve been quar- 
tered in German homes. Because I'd come 
from Milwaukee I understand German, and I 
came to know what these Germans thought of 
us and of the rest of the world. They weren't 
-Prussians, these men and women of Neuweid 


and Trier and Coblenz and of the little villages 
along the Rhine. They are the people whom 
we had half-believed to be victims of Prussian- 
ism. But are they glad that the Kaiser had 
been overthrown and his system disestab- 
lished? ‘They are not! 

With somber eyes they watched us. With 
furtive queries they plied us. The men who’d 
fought in the German Army had nothing to 
say, but the old men would come sneaking 
around, always with some trivial reason, but 
always with the questions, “What do your 
people think of the war now? Are they not 
divided about it? And will they trust more 
billions and billions to your government for 
another Loan now that the war is ended?” 
“You bet they will,” we told them. They went 
away shaking their heads. 

Why do they care about whether or not the 
people of the United States subscribed to the 
Victory Liberty Loan? we asked ourselves. 
At first we couldn’t answer. The Germans 
themselves answered us after awhile. From 
them we came to know that they hadn’t ex- 
pected, even when our government went into 
war against them, that the American people 
would stand back of it. They thought that the 
Germans in America were going to be strong 
enough to hold the nation from real support of 
the war against Germany. The first Liberty 
Loan punctured that belief. The second Lib- 
erty Loan tore a hole init. The Third Liberty 
Loan left it flat. The Fourth Liberty Loan 
pulled off the rubber from the wheel. For 
when even those cities that the Germans 
thought their strongholds, Chicago, St. Louis, 

Cincinnatti, “your Milwaukee,” as they said to 


me, helped to send the Loans skyrocketing, 
Germany knew that the people of the United 
States were solid against her. She knew that 
not only the governmental machinery but the 
money and the spirit of the United States 
fought her. In the knowledge that unlimited 
munitions were coming to millions of men, 
Germany smashed. The fear of 1919 ended 
the war in 1918. 

But, with the Armistice signed, Germany 
waits. She must pay the piper, but payment 
can not take forever. Once before, when Bon- 
aparte conquered her, she paid, but the old men 
in whose homes the Army of Occupation is 
quartered today served in an Army of Occupa- 
tion in France in 1871. The wheel turns, they 
tell each other and their sons and grandsons. 
“We can not win from you,” they tell us. “You 
are too rich, too rash, too young! But, this 
war done, your people may not care what hap- 
pens. Even now we hear they are indifferent. 
And in fifteen, twenty years, who knows?” 
And so they keep watch there in the Rhine 
Valley, as they keep watch throughout Ger- 
many, for the barometer that shall teli them 
how America feels, the barometer of the Vic- 
tory Liberty Loan. If that shall tell them that 
the people of the United States no longer care 
enough for a just cause to pay with thanksgiv- 
ing the cost of their victory, then the fire under 
the ashes of Germany militarism will glow un- 
til the day when it may dare to blaze once 
more. | | 

ab a tee ae tg 

We were on the march through Luxembourg 
on a November Sunday when a crowd of us 
loitered beside the road, revelling in the quiet 


-and lovely serenity of the sheltered country- 
side. The Second had gone through the 
twenty-eighth of May at Chateau Thierry, 
through Soissons and the Argonne, through 
Saint Mihiel and the Argonne-Meuse. We had 
charged up the Lookout Mountain slope of 
Mont Blanc under the fire of the German guns. 
We had fought in the last Verdun battle. 
From March until November we had gone for- 
ward without rest, sometimes going without 
sleep for seventy-two hours. Now, victorious, 
in the enemy’s country and in peace, we rested. 

suddenly a motor car swung around the 
turn of a little church. In front of us it came 
to a sharp halt. We sprang to attention as 
_ General John Lejeune, commanding general of 
the Second, spoke. ‘“Who’s your ranking non- 
commissioned officer ?” 

ity SITs 

“Why aren’t you all at services?” 

We had no answer. No one had even 
thought to go. 

“How long have you been in this Division?” 

“Since it was organized, sir.” 

“I should think that any one who has gone 
through what you have, and come out of it, 
would want to thank God.” 

Come to think of it, we did.. Without a 
word we went down to the little church. 
There, remembering the men who had started 
out with us and who would not go back with 
us, we gave our thanks. 

Isn’ t the Victory Liberty Loan the church 
down the road for the American nation; the 
chance to thank God for life, for liberty, for 
peace; the place of promise that this peace and 
freedom won by the blood of the men who fell 


in France shall not be forfeited by our indif- 
ference? 

Because I can not forget the look on the 
faces of boys lying dead on the field at Chateau 
Thierry, because I can not forget the bombed 
hospitals and the shattered villages; because I 
can not forget the brave, blithe wounded who 
crowd the homecoming ships I am daring to 
sound this trumpet before the walls of Jericho. 

Not for us who have come through do I ask 
remembrance; but for those who come back to 
you maimed and for those who will not come 
‘back do I ask recollection of what the war cost. 
That they may not have died in vain it is our 
nation’s task to watch, even as the German 
watches. That the German may know that we 
are not forgetting, not faltering in our great 
task, it is the first and paramount duty of the 
people of the United States to make this peace 
permanent by putting upon it the great seal of 
the Victory Liberty Loan. When that is set, 
the German will know that the American na- 
tion echoes the battle cry of the Second, “What 
we take, we hold.” We have taken peace. Let 
us hold it. For, unless we hold it now, the 
day will come when the great gray ships will 
be slipping out of the harbors again; and it 
will be our fault then that dead boys will be 
lying on the fields of France. 

It’s up to you, to me, to all of us here, to 
make this the last war with Germany. For the 
sake of the men who died, for the sake of other 
boys who will die if we fail, will you do your 
part in the Victory Liberty Loan that the 
Watch on the Rhine may know that we are 
united in triumph as we were united in war? 


